Maintenance

Our 2015 Jeep Renegade Trailhawk is no longer pulling to the right. But the path to getting it sorted out wasn't entirely smooth. That's fairly typical with this kind of thing.

That's because drift/pull is often confused with a different issue: an off-center steering wheel. A proper diagnosis starts with understanding the difference so it can be clearly articulating it to the service technician.

An off-center steering wheel is just what it sounds like. The steering wheel is visibly cocked to one side when driving straight on a typically-crowned road, which is defined as two percent down to the right. You don't feel any unusual resistance, the car will continue on a reasonably straight course if you momentarily release the wheel. The steering wheel is crooked, is all, probably due to a minor alignment problem.

Drift/pull is different and isn't — pardon the pun — as straightforward, possibly because those two words describe the same thing two ways. Pull is what you feel if you find you must apply steering torque to go straight ahead on a normally-crowned road. Drift is the subsequent vehicle movement you see if you stop applying that correctional torque and let go.

But here it gets tricky. When you release the wheel to observe the drift, the wheel may well rotate to that side. But this is not necessarily indicative of an underlying alignment problem unless the wheel is also off-center when you guide the car straight with your hands on the wheel.

It is possible to have both problems at the same time, and that's exactly what was going on with our Jeep Renegade. It had an off-center steering wheel and a pull to the right.

Ed already told you about our 2015 Jeep Renegade Trailhawk pulling to the right. This started following the Renegade's recent 20,000-mile service and tire rotation. Readers suggested various diagnoses and fixes, and we kicked the problem around the office a little bit. Alignment seemed like an obvious place to start, but a few voices felt strongly that it was more of a wheel/tire issue.

We opted to start with a road force balance from our preferred local tire spot, Stokes Tires Service. A road force balance typically seeks to alleviate up/down or fore/aft shake, but but we thought it was worth ruling out whether our problems stemmed from lateral movement.

As we wrote recently, our 2015 Jeep Renegade Trailhawk has cruised past 20,000 miles on its odometer. Around the same time, the Renegade's driver information display posted a notification that we were due for an oil change (the Renegade's service interval is every 10,000 miles).

I am writing to inform you that my briefcase is not a person. Every other car I drive rightly identifies it as an inanimate object, and yet you, and specifically your passenger seat seatbelt warning chime, seem to think that it is. Although I am open to non-humans being considered sentient beings, I am quite certain the "Oakley Home Office" is not the next Data or Number Six.

This was Mike Schmidt's suggestion regarding our long-term 2015 Jeep Renegade Trailhawk and its visit to Glenn E Thomas Jeep in Long Beach. By this point, the Renegade had been in the shop three days and it was still unclear how much longer things would take. We weren't going to wait any longer.

Just in time for the holidays, the Engine Oil Life Low notification appeared on our long-term 2015 Jeep Renegade Trailhawk. The notification appeared at around the 7,500-mile mark, and with the Jeep set to leave on road-trip duty, I only had a couple of days to get it in for its first service.

Initially, we tried to drop off the Renegade on the way into work. Unfortunately, the first dealer we tried was so busy that we couldn't get an appointment until after the New Year.

Defeated, I looked around for other dealers in the Los Angeles area. Alhambra Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram, the dealer where we purchased our Renegade, is about five miles from my home. They also had an appointment available for 9:00 a.m. the next morning.

I'm accustomed to a few of the noises our 2015 Jeep Renegade Trailhawk makes. From the intermittent rumble at low-speed deceleration that we've experienced since day one to the light plastic-on-plastic squeak the steering wheel makes when you crank it while stationary. Over the weekend, I found a new noise from the rear cargo area.

I've heard it every time I've taken our 2015 Jeep Renegade Trailhawk for a spin. It doesn't happen all the time, but it happens regularly in certain circumstances. And it stands out to me because it was totally absent from the early press sample I drove a few months ago.

What am I on about? I call it the Renegade Rumble, a low-level grumbling sound that comes from down low behind the driver's seat under the back of the vehicle somewhere. It's not terribly loud, but the low frequency nature of the thing hovers on the edge of being an outright vibration.

No one could ever accuse the Renegade of being a quiet vehicle. It's not like this is the only noise it makes. The exhaust is fairly buzzy, there are a few rpm ranges where it drones in certain gears, and it's a shoo-in for the Nobel lack-of-peace prize when it comes to the production of idle vibration.

But unlike those sounds, the rumble doesn't seem to correspond to anything that should be going on. It doesn't feel right.

We want to know if Jeep is capable of competing in a new, but important, segment. Jeep, like every other automaker, must make smaller and more fuel-efficient vehicles in order to meet government emissions and fuel economy standards. Can Jeep reconcile its SUV- and truck-based heritage with the realities of modern emissions and fuel economy regulations?

With the Renegade, Jeep set out to create a vehicle that doesn't have to make excuses. Inexpensive doesn't mean cheap anymore. Small doesn't mean less capable. The compact crossover class is highly competitive, with solid offerings like the Honda HR-V and Mazda CX-3. Jeep can't afford a subpar product.